The Fennel Family Papers: A Novel - Hardcover

Like Baldwin's acclaimed first novel, The Hard to Catch Mercy, which won the Lillian Smith Award for Fiction, his second is set in a South Carolina coastal town and sends up Southern Gothic. What's new here is a wickedly funny academic satire, grafted onto a manic plot featuring murder, madness, incest, a ghost and spirit possession. Ambitious, reclusive history professor Paul Danvers, desperate to achieve tenure, starts an affair with his student, Ginny Fennel, in order to gain access to the private papers of her notorious family, lighthouse keepers since the American Revolution, whose ancestors include slave dealers, black marketers and adventurers. As Paul sifts the Fennel archives?and as he fends off Ginny's uncle, homicidal maniac Leroy Ramona, who has incestuous designs on his niece?the self-centered professor stumbles upon family skeletons. Did Ginny's wheelchair-bound father become paralyzed by falling off a porch or by jumping from a lighthouse?or was he trying to fly, caught in a voodoo spell cast by the Fennels' Gullah-speaking black servant? Was lighthouse keeper Captain Jack Fennel, Ginny's great-grandfather, a Civil War hero or a murderously indifferent cook? As this gripping, macabre, witty romp progresses, and as deranged Ginny slips into the personality of her great-grand-aunt and thinks it's 1861, Paul seems ever more likely to perish than to publish.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Pathetically eager to make the tenure track, nerdy history professor Paul Danvers thinks he has hit the mother lode when he gains access to the famous Fennel family papers. Obsessed by his quest to unearth the ancient southern family's secrets, Danvers desperately tries to overlook the peculiar and often menacing behavior of various relatives, including a psychotic nephew whose overly enthusiastic greetings invariably cause Danvers untold pain. As he meticulously pores over the musty, moldering papers, he finds little more than recipes and weather notations. It's the family servant, Da Bena, a skillful witch doctor, who proves to be the true repository of the Fennels' history, which encompasses miscegenation, treason, and slave running. In the novel's oddly brilliant climax, Danvers finds himself engaged in hand-to-hand combat with modern-day pirates while defending a lady's honor. His triumph causes him to lose both his taste for history and his fear of living. Baldwin, also the author of The Hard to Catch Mercy (1993), fuels his rollicking satire with large doses of anarchic humor and totally unpredictable storytelling. And Baldwin is that rare thing--a satirist with a lot of heart. A comic gem. Joanne Wilkinson